The telephone industry currently offers its craftspersons a variety of wire termination tools for cutting and stuffing or seating individual telephone wires in telephone wire receptacles or jacks. Where the receptacle/jack is a relatively robust structure, such as a terminal block mounted to a telephone office mainframe, an impact tool used to seat and cut one wire at the time may be employed. Where the wire termination is not affixed to a relatively stable structure, as in the case of a relatively compact, reduced capacity telephone jack, such as the above-referenced RJ-45/M-series type jack, a description of which may be found in the U.S. patent to Sahlburg et al, U.S. Pat. No. 5,830,003 (hereinafter referred to as the '003 patent), for example, installing and cutting the wires by means of a multi-blade compression tool (such as an Anixter Part No. 139587), requires careful independent handling of a plurality of parts, in order to properly align the blades of the tool with the wire seating slots of the jack.
For example, if the cutting-head is not precisely aligned with the jack, a small amount of play between the tool may result. As a consequence, rather than cut a respective wire with the intended guillotine type of shearing/cutting action desired, the tool blade either deflects along the exterior of the wire's insulation jacket, or only slightly cuts into the jacket—bending the wire around the edge and then down along the side of the receptacle. The problem is exacerbated if the craftsperson fails to properly maintain alignment between the tool's cutting head and the jack as it is engaged by the jaws of the tool. If the wire-cutting head is tilted rather than being normal to the jack, for example, the blade may dig into the jack or may extend so far over an edge thereof, that the blade does nothing more than bend, rather than cut, the wire. Any wires that remain uncut must then be severed individually by the craftsperson by means of a separate wire cutter.
In accordance with the invention described in the U.S. patent to Fallandy, U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,603 (hereinafter referred to as the '603 patent), such cutting head/jack misalignment problems are addressed by a pistol-grip type of multi-wire seating and termination tool that is operative, as the user squeezes the tool's trigger, to translate a multi-blade cutting head carrier into linear alignment with the jack, so as to bring the blades of the cutting head into engagement with the wire insertion slots of the jack, and thereby cause the cutting head to reliably seat and cut the wires.